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NVIDIA kicked off CES 2019 on Sunday night by outlining plans to put to work the new graphics technology of real-time ray tracing in gaming and content creation in an array of laptops and desktops.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the GeForce RTX 2060, which at $349 makes NVIDIA’s new Turing architecture accessible to tens of millions of PC gamers.

NVIDIA says that the RTX 2060 is 60 percent faster on current titles than the prior-generation GTX 1060, NVIDIA’s most popular GPU, and beats the gameplay of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. With Turing’s RT Cores and Tensor Cores, it can run Battlefield V with ray tracing at 60 frames per second.

The RTX 2060 features a major upgrade of the core streaming multiprocessor to more efficiently handle the compute-heavy workloads of modern games. It supports concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations, adaptive shading technology and a new unified memory architecture with twice the cache of its predecessor. Modern games can utilize these features to achieve up to 2x the performance of the GTX 1060 GPU, according to NVIDIA.

NVIDIA GeForce Specification Comparison

RTX 2060 Founders Edition

GTX 1060 6GB

GTX 1070

RTX 2070

CUDA Cores

1920

1280

1920

2304

ROPs

48

48

64

64

Core Clock

1365MHz

1506MHz

1506MHz

1410MHz

Boost Clock

1680MHz

1709MHz

1683MHz

1620MHz
FE: 1710MHz

Memory Clock

14Gbps GDDR6

8Gbps GDDR5

8Gbps GDDR5

14Gbps GDDR6

Memory Bus Width

192-bit

192-bit

256-bit

256-bit

VRAM

6GB

6GB

8GB

8GB

Single Precision Perf.

6.5 TFLOPS

4.4 TFLOPs

6.5 TFLOPS

7.5 TFLOPs
FE: 7.9 TFLOPS

"RTX-OPS"

37T

N/A

N/A

45T

SLI Support

No

No

Yes

No

TDP

160W

120W

150W

175W
FE: 185W

GPU

TU106

GP106

GP104

TU106

Architecture

Turing

Pascal

Pascal

Turing

Manufacturing Process

TSMC 12nm "FFN"

TSMC 16nm

TSMC 16nm

TSMC 12nm "FFN"

The RTX 2060 comes equipped with 6GB of GDDR6 memory and 240 Tensor Cores that can deliver 52 teraflops of deep learning horsepower, which can improve gaming performance through a feature known as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).

DLSS leverages a deep neural network to extract multidimensional features of the rendered scene and intelligently combine details from multiple frames to construct a high-quality final image. The result is a crisp image with similar quality as traditional rendering, but with higher performance.

Electronic Arts and DICE will shortly release an update to Battlefield V that will incorporate DLSS support, as well as additional optimizations for real-time ray tracing.

Anthem is the anticipated online multiplayer action role-playing game from BioWare and represents Electronic Arts’ first original IP in over a decade. Anthem is also the latest AAA title to announce support for DLSS.

Anthem is poised to be the biggest game in the history of BioWare, a record that includes blockbuster franchises such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Game developers in China are stepping up to the world stage in terms of graphics realism, led by NetEase and their hit game, Justice. Announced at GTC China in November, Justice will also use real-time ray tracing and DLSS at the same time. At CES, we featured a Justice tech demo that shows the power of RTX.

The Justice demo is the first RTX game content out of China. The demo features ray-traced reflections, shadows and caustics. It’s the first time that real-time ray tracing has been used for caustics.

Benchmark creator United Laboratories has launched a new benchmark to measure real-time ray-tracing performance. The 3DMark Port Royal benchmark will support ray tracing for realistic specular reflections and pixel-perfect hard shadows as well as DLSS. 3DMark Port Royal will be available Jan. 8, with a DLSS update coming shortly thereafter.

Moscow-based Mundfish is currently crafting Atomic Heart, an alt-universe first-person shooter with a unique look, feel and style set during the height of the Soviet Union. Gamers got a look at an Atomic Heart tech demo highlighting ray-tracing and DLSS at CES.

First previewed at Gamescom, Atomic Heart features RTX with DLSS and multiple varieties of ray tracing. Using visual cues made popular by the great Hollywood directors, long creeping shadows and reflections of what is behind the player give a hint as to the new gameplay made possible by using RTX technologies.

Let's have a look at the specifications of the GeForce RTX 2060 (6GB) Founders Edition.

The card sports 1920 CUDA cores, meaning we’re looking at a 30 SM configuration, versus RTX 2070’s 36 SMs. As the core architecture of Turing is designed to scale with the number of SMs, this means that all of the core compute features are being scaled down similarly, so the 17% drop in SMs means a 17% drop in the RT Core count, a 17% drop in the tensor core count, a 17% drop in the texture unit count, a 17% drop in L0/L1 caches, etc.

Clockspeeds are close to NVIDIA’s other TU106 card, RTX 2070. The base clockspeed is down a bit to 1365MHz, but the boost clock is up a bit to 1680MHz. So on the whole, RTX 2060 is poised to deliver around 87% of the RTX 2070’s compute/RT/texture performance.

The card is shipping with just 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM, as opposed to 8GB on its bigger brother. The result of this is that NVIDIA is not populating 2 of TU106’s 8 memory controllers, resulting in a 192-bit memory bus and meaning that with the use of 14Gbps GDDR6, RTX 2060 only offers 75% of the memory bandwidth of the RTX 2070.

NVIDIA is rating the RTX 2060 for a TDP of 160W. This is down from the RTX 2070, but only slightly, as those cards are rated for 175W.

For a limited time, gamers buying a qualifying GeForce RTX 2060, or a new desktop PC equipped with the RTX 2060, can choose to receive Anthem or Battlefield V. This bundle promotion is available in most regions around the world.

GeForce RTX-powered laptops will be available starting Jan. 29 from the world's top OEMs, including Acer, Alienware, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo Legion, MSI, Razer and Samsung. They will also be available from local OEMs and system builders, including Aftershock, CyberPower PC, Hasee, Maingear, Mechrevo, Mouse, Origin PC, PC Specialist, Scan, Schenker, Terrans Force and Thunderobot.

During his presentation at CEW, Huang segued to a demo: a futuristic hero is equipped with armor, with the whole thing rendered in stunning detail, thanks to real-time ray tracing. This demo, though, has a twist. The hero launches himself into the sky, before sticking a suitably heroic landing. And then he gets stuck. The takeaway: real-time ray tracing makes real-time cinematic graphics possible.

Huang announced that RTX will be able to use Autodesk Arnold for interactive rendering. RTX will be able to be used to do 8K RED video editing.

Nvidia also partners with OBS on pro-quality broadcast streaming on a single PC, rather than the two that are currently required. RTX can also be used for high-end VR — with VirtualLink — a single wire that connects the GPU to the head mounted display — and other features with HTC, which the company will announce later at CES.

G-SYNC Compatible Monitors and BFGD Pre-Orders

NVIDIA also continues to push forward the state of the art for gaming displays. Launched in 2013, G-SYNC introduced gamers to smooth variable refresh rate gameplay, with no screen tearing and no V-Sync input lag.

Huang announced plans to bring NVIDIA’s expertise with display technology to the broader pool of adaptive sync displays, announcing 12 G-SYNC Compatible displays and bringing smooth and beautiful gameplay to more gamers.

There are hundreds of monitor models available capable of variable refresh rates (VRR) using the VESA DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync protocol. However, the VRR gaming experience can vary widely.

To improve the experience for gamers, NVIDIA will test monitors. Those that pass Nvidia's validation tests will be G-SYNC Compatible and enabled by default in the GeForce driver.

Support for G-SYNC Compatible monitors will begin Jan. 15 with the launch of Nvidia's first 2019 Game Ready driver. Already, 12 monitors have been validated as G-SYNC Compatible.

For the most demanding gamers, G-SYNC and G-SYNC Ultimate HDR displays featuring an NVIDIA G-SYNC processor will represent the very highest image quality, performance and experience. These displays will benefit from an end-to-end certification process that includes more than 300 tests for image quality.

The integration of the Android TV-based SHIELD into BFGDs allows gamers to switch between gaming and other forms of entertainment.

The optional SHIELD remote and game controller allow for navigation and access to all of the world’s biggest streaming apps, including Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube and Hulu.

With support for the Google Assistant, the entire experience can be controlled simply by using your voice.

These displays bring a big-screen gaming experience to PC games and are ideal for a gaming den or even your living room.

If you want the biggest and best G-SYNC Ultimate PC gaming display, it’s available for pre-order now from HP. Other Nvidia partners will start taking pre-orders as we approach the launch of BFGDs later this quarter.